The Vehicles of Tron: Legacy

Tron: Legacy throws new vehicles into digital combat, and we talk to the lead vehicle designer about creating the film's signature rides.

Those who remember Disney’s original Tron from 1982 know that even in the parallel universe of the computer world known as the Grid, you still need a cool vehicle in which to get around. Hollywood is the ultimate recycling machine, and the Tron franchise finally got a reboot in 2010 with Tron: Legacy (in 3-D, of course).

In this sequel, Tron characters old and new are furnished with a totally revamped motor pool of wondrous vehicles in which to romp around the Grid. We’ve seen the film and can say that, as in the original Tron, the vehicles once again give the most riveting performances.

Lead vehicle designer Daniel Simon, 35, is an alum of Volkswagen’s advanced design studio, where he worked on concept cars such as the Volkswagen Magellan, shown at Detroit in 2002. He came to Disney’s attention after producing a book of futuristic concepts, widely known among designers, called Cosmic Motors.

For Tron: Legacy, Simon was tasked with redesigning not only the iconic Light Cycle, the two-wheeled machine with which players in the Grid’s gladiatorial games battle one another, but also some new vehicles, including a four-wheeled metamorphic car/dune buggy called the Light Runner and a combat jet.

Black over Black—over Black

The biggest challenge, Simon says, was working within director Joseph Kosinski and production designer Darren Gilford’s concept of an all-black world with black-clad people and glossy-black vehicles. The first step was to draw what designers call “read lines,” or the lines that define the basic shape of an object. In Tron, those read lines had to be expressed as luminescent stripes that sort of look like external circuitry but actually define the curves of the vehicle in the same way that light plays across a painted car body in the real world.

“If a car is black in a black room, you have to use these light lines to define the shape,” says Simon. Using those light lines, “we tried to take the simple beauty of the original [film] and modernize it. If it were up to me, we could just paint a Lancia Stratos black, and that would be cool.”

But it wasn’t up to him, as Tron fans already had an expectation of what the Grid’s vehicles were supposed to look like. The original Light Cycle was a creation of the grandfather of vehicle futurism, Syd Mead, and Simon spent some time talking with Mead while working on the redesign.

The original Cycle had “an ’80s-industrial retro-cool” to it, says Simon, and for the new film it was redrawn to be more athletic and curvy. It was Simon’s first motorcycle design job, and it proved to be difficult because, unlike a car, “you have to also draw a rider.”

If the prone riding position in the film looks familiar, it’s because “I’m a huge Burt Munro fan,” says Simon, referring to the New Zealander who ran his modified motorcycles at Bonneville and was the subject of the 2005 film The World’s Fastest Indian.

Thanks to the huge advances in computer graphic technology over the past three or so decades, the vehicles in the new Tron show far more mechanical detail than do those in the original film, including spinning turbine blades, articulating suspensions, tire treads, and gearboxes. Tire smoke, heat waves, rain, and other atmospheric details that weren’t possible in 1982 are in the new film. They actually dovetail with the plot, says Simon, because the new Grid is supposed to be main character Kevin Flynn’s (played again by Jeff Bridges) personal creation, and it reflects how Flynn thinks vehicles are supposed to work and the effects of the more sophisticated software with which he can now program them.

With the four-wheeled Light Runner, Simon and director Kosinski, who had the final word on the design, came up with the idea of an exposed pedal box, which allowed some opportunities for different camera angles, such as a shot of femme fatale Quorra (Olivia Wilde) flooring the gas—er, electron?—pedal.

The jet proved to be one of the most challenging projects, says Simon. “It’s not easy to design a plane when, the day before, you were discussing wheelbases and dash-to-axle ratios.” Simon struggled with rendering the shape of an aircraft but eventually discovered there are lots of opportunities to convey emotion such as danger and malevolence with an airplane’s shape, especially its wings.

Is the Movie Any Good?

In the new movie—set some 30 years after the original—Flynn’s son, Sam Flynn, played by Garrett Hedlund, has been struggling since his dad mysteriously disappeared two decades before. Through a nostalgic plot contrivance, the younger Flynn gets flung into the new Grid, where he and Dad reunite and have to battle their way out against an evil program named Clu, also played by Bridges, in this case graphically altered to appear younger. Bike fans take note: Ducati gets a major promo in the film.

The original Tron was decades ahead of its time in its merging of live and computer-generated action, but the relatively clunky technology of the day meant that the clever story line of a computer world as an allegorical stand-in for the real world could co-exist in good balance with the computer-generated imagery. In short, the CG bits didn’t overshadow everything else, and audiences were at once wowed by the on-screen goodies and invested in the story.

Tron: Legacy, however, is very much of its time. Befitting the current state of modern science-fiction films, which are often little more than dramatic, extended commercials for video games and toys, the graphic elements are sprayed at a pace too blistering for the human eye or brain to fully comprehend. Plot and character development are secondary. Deeper existential themes between the gun battles and Light Cycle chases are hinted at but are only superficially explored. And Bridges seems less interested in reprising Flynn and more in “the Dude” from The Big Lebowski.